Our customer’s business challenge was to combine incoming payments to open invoices due to incorrect and incomplete reference numbers. This problem occurred with international companies, especially. After implementing Elinar’s AI solution, the degree of automation in invoice processing will grow from 40 % to 80 %.
Background
Many companies are struggling with the problem, that the client’s payments don’t correlate with the open invoices. Especially in international trade, the transaction costs are higher. That has led to the clients holding back payments combining their total into one transaction.
These received transactions don’t automatically connect to the open invoices because instead of using the original invoices reference numbers, the client has written down all the bill numbers in the transaction message fields. And that’s not even the problem yet – code-based programs can easily handle these few situations. But in most cases, when there aren’t space enough to write every bill numbers out, clients cut, shorten and edit them in many imaginative ways. The other problematic situation is when the client has left the invoice totally empty and explains the details of payments via email. That’s something that ERP software can’t handle automatically.
It might not sound like a major problem, but in one industrial company, nearly twenty employees’ resources are needed to process these complicated transactions. The employees manually pick out the information from the transactions’ message fields and emails, having to go through the payments made. That’s the bottleneck where the trainable ElinarAI™ is needed because it removes the problem.
ElinarAI™ took automated processing to a new level
Elinar’s and the client’s common goal was to automate the cash allocation process. The easiest and most cost-effective way for this problem was an AI-focused management solution. Elinar is specialized in using AI in processing unstructured data. The solution we offered was IBM Datacap© combined with our own product ElinarAI™, that can be trained to understand the context and how to interpret information according to it.
Capture-solution that we provided can locate and take the needed information from emails and documents also being capable of interpreting which serial numbers correlate to which invoices. The AI will go through all the incoming transactions and automates the invoicing process as far as possible.
With our help, the invoice processing automation can increase in this kind of cases from 40 % to 80 %. Our client companies can have a better analysis of their operations, which helps them to improve their businesses. Making decisions concerning your businesses are easier to make when you have more data to interpret.
Pilot projects prove the effects of using AI
Co-operation with us is inspiring and safe for that we always start bigger projects with a pilot project. Once we have identified your company’s business challenges, we will make out a proposal of how we should start solving them. We’ll create a prototype based on the data acquired from the client. Then both parties can agree on the concept to be working and can do a final decision of starting the project with trusting minds. Pilot projects lengths are mostly depending on the case.
Even if there are no challenges to combine payments with open invoices, we can automate many other manual labor-intensive steps. If you have any questions or the possible need for our services, give us a call!
Solution benefits:
- The invoicing process can be automated further than before using an AI-focused solution.
- AI will be trained to understand specifically your company’s operating environment.
- Automated data processing improves the analysis quality which can be used to benefit the company in various ways.
- Taking AI as a part of your business makes it possible to benefit from it in other challenges as well, making it also easier to start new projects.
Used technologies:
Ari Juntunen, CTO
+358 40 524 4482